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But let us leave the arts and consider those works produced by
Nature and admitted to be naturally beautiful which the creations
of art are charged with imitating, all reasoning life and
unreasoning things alike, but especially the consummate among
them, where the moulder and maker has subdued the material and
given the form he desired. Now what is the beauty here? It has
nothing to do with the blood or the menstrual process: either
there is also a colour and form apart from all this, or there is
nothing unless sheer ugliness or a bare recipient, as it were the
mere Matter of beauty.
Whence shone forth the beauty of Helen, battle-sought; or of all
those women like in loveliness to Aphrodite; or of Aphrodite
herself; or of any human being that has been perfect in beauty;
or of any of these gods manifest to sight, or unseen but carrying
what would be beauty if we saw?
In all these is it not the Idea, something of that realm but
communicated to the produced from within the producer just as in
works of art, we held, it is communicated from the arts to their
creations? Now we can surely not believe that, while the made
thing and the Idea thus impressed upon Matter are beautiful, yet
the Idea not so alloyed but resting still with the creator- the
Idea primal, immaterial, firmly a unity- is not Beauty.
If material extension were in itself the ground of beauty, then
the creating principle, being without extension, could not be
beautiful: but beauty cannot be made to depend upon magnitude
since, whether in a large object or a small, the one Idea equally
moves and forms the mind by its inherent power. A further
indication is that as long as the object remains outside us we
know nothing of it; it affects us by entry; but only as an Idea
can it enter through the eyes which are not of scope to take an
extended mass: we are, no doubt, simultaneously possessed of the
magnitude which, however, we take in not as mass but by an
elaboration upon the presented form.
Then again the principle producing the beauty must be, itself,
ugly, neutral or beautiful: ugly, it could not produce the
opposite; neutral, why should its product be the one rather than
the other? The Nature, then, which creates things so lovely must
be itself of a far earlier beauty; we, undisciplined in
discernment of the inward, knowing nothing of it, run after the
outer, never understanding that it is the inner which stirs us;
we are in the case of one who sees his own reflection but not
realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it.
But that the thing we are pursuing is something different and
that the beauty is not in the concrete object is manifest from
the beauty there is in matters of study, in conduct and custom;
briefly in soul or mind. And it is precisely here that the
greater beauty lies, perceived whenever you look to the wisdom in
a man and delight in it, not wasting attention on the face, which
may be hideous, but passing all appearance by and catching only
at the inner comeliness, the truly personal; if you are still
unmoved and cannot acknowledge beauty under such conditions, then
looking to your own inner being you will find no beauty to
delight you and it will be futile in that state to seek the
greater vision, for you will be questing it through the ugly and
impure.
This is why such matters are not spoken of to everyone; you, if
you are conscious of beauty within, remember.
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